Adventures with lightweight and minimalist software for Linux

yapet: Oh, what a difference three years makes

Perhaps its my own personality, or perhaps yapet has matured sufficiently in the last three and a half years to fully win my appreciation.

yapet is a password “wallet,” I guess, but is fully enclosed and functional within its own interface and settings. I make that distinction because for the past year or so I’ve been a rabid fan of pass, which keeps most of its structure at the command line, and relies on core Unix-ish tools.

Contrast that with pwsafe, which we saw months and months ago. It still hovers at the command line, but obscures the data tree that is plainly visible with pass. If that bothers you, you’ll prefer pwsafe.

yapet inflates the concept to a full console application, with its own measures of obscurity and security. You have to supply a password to get into the application. Once there, you can manage your passwords from within the application, leaving no visible data trace in your history, with the possible exception of invoking yapet.

yapet offers onboard password generation with the option to add (or avoid) special characters and punctuation. It will pull random characters from /dev/random, /dev/urandom and other sources.

File operation and menus are all done with strong colors and an obvious and intuitive arrangement. yapet worked fine as far down as 80×24, and I didn’t feel a need to squish it any more than that.

Three years ago I offered a small critique of the Debian version available at the time, mentioning that at 120Mhz, there were terrifying screen refreshes that more or less kept me from using it.

I can’t say for sure how the newest versions — 1.0 at the time of this writing, released only four or five months ago — would behave and super-slow speeds. I know on this machine, coasting along at a comfortable 2.6Ghz and with a proprietary video driver under X, there was no hint of that same flickering effect.

Which I credit the yapet team for eliminating — and for making yapet into something quite enjoyable. I am sure it is gratifying to watch a program grow from an idea to version 1.0; it’s likewise satisfying to see something go from fair-to-middling to bona-fide-rock-and-roll-star.

I’m more than willing to hand out one of my few remaining K.Mandla gold stars to yapet. Well done, sirs and madams, well done.⭐😉

P.S.: No, those aren’t my real passwords. You shouldn’t even have to ask that question.